No "live service" game lives forever, or in the euphemistic language of the games business, they all get "sunsetted" eventually. At a GDC talk this week, Velan Studios director of marketing Josh Harrison implored other developers to prepare for that inevitability, ideally by doing the thing we also hope they'll do every time: making their games available to play even after the official servers are unplugged.
Harrison was in charge of marketing for competitive dodgeball game Knockout City. We loved the game, which we awarded a 90% in our review, but even after going free-to-play, it struggled to retain players. Velan Studios shut down Knockout City's servers two years after it launched.
